First Landing — 1607, before Jamestown
On April 26, 1607, the English colonists of the Virginia Company made their first landfall at Cape Henry — the northern tip of present-day Virginia Beach — before sailing up the James River to found Jamestown a few weeks later. The site is preserved as First Landing State Park (formerly Seashore State Park), and a stone cross at Cape Henry marks the spot. It's a piece of US origin-story most visitors don't realize they're driving past on the way to the kite zone. The Powhatan-affiliated Chesepian people inhabited this coast before contact; they had already been destroyed — by the Powhatan paramount chief, according to John Smith's account — shortly before the English arrived. The land where you'll rig was contested ground long before it was a resort.
Master Jet Base — F/A-18s overhead, all day
Naval Air Station Oceana sits inside Virginia Beach city limits, and Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story occupies the bayfront approach. NAS Oceana is the Navy's East Coast Master Jet Base — home to every operational F/A-18 Super Hornet squadron on the Atlantic side. Afterburner takeoffs over the resort strip are routine, not occasional. The city's official position is captured in a slogan you'll see on signs: 'Jet Noise — The Sound of Freedom.' Whether that lands as patriotic or oppressive is a matter of taste. Either way, plan for it: if you came here for silence, you came to the wrong beach. The military presence also shapes the demographic — a meaningful share of locals are active-duty, retired, or military-adjacent, and that texture runs through the bars, the schools, and the politics.
Sandbridge, Pungo, and the Back Bay backcountry
South of the resort strip, Virginia Beach unwinds into something most tourists never see. Sandbridge is a quieter beach community of stilt houses and rental cottages with no boardwalk and no high-rises — the local-favorite alternative to the oceanfront. Below Sandbridge, Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge and False Cape State Park run all the way to the North Carolina line: tidal marsh, maritime forest, feral horses, no through-road. Inland, Pungo is the city's farm belt — strawberry fields, soybean acreage, and a stubborn agricultural identity inside what's technically the most populous city in Virginia. The further south you drive from the boardwalk, the less Virginia Beach feels like a resort and the more it feels like the rural coastal South.
Cape Henry Light, Bay Side, and what got paved over
Cape Henry Lighthouse, completed in 1792, was the first federally-funded public works project of the United States — built under George Washington's administration to mark the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. The original tower still stands inside Fort Story. The bay side itself has its own layered history: before 1965, the Bay Shore community at Seaview was one of the few oceanfront resorts on the East Coast where Black Americans could vacation during segregation. It was largely demolished and redeveloped in the 1960s and 70s — a piece of African-American beach culture that mostly survives now in archival photography. On the inland side, Mount Trashmore — a city park built on top of a capped landfill in 1974 — became a national model for adaptive reuse and is now where locals fly trainer kites. Virginia Beach's identity is stitched together from this mix: founding-era monuments, military hardware, segregation-era erasure, and 35 miles of sand the city has spent a century learning how to monetize.